Robert R. Shafer | Through the Shattered Lens

When six interchangeable college students spend the weekend at an abandoned mansion, strange things start to happen. First, the caretaker disappears. Then, the students start to disappear, one-by-one. “We should call the police!” Sarah (Linda West) says, once it becomes apparent that more than half of the cast has vanished without a trace.

However, there’s already a cop on the scene.

Unfortunately, that cop is Joe Vickers (Robert R. Shafer), an escapee from the local mental institution who subsequently became a member of the California Highway Patrol. He drives a squad car and sometimes a motorcycle. He wears a uniform. He carries handcuffs and he uses cop lingo. He’s a CHiP with an attitude and no one would ever mistake him for Ponch or Jon Baker. He’s also a Satanist, who likes to draw pentagrams in the dirt and kill anyone who comes across his path. We may see six interchangeable college students but Joe Vickers sees six blood sacrifices and, while the students search for each other, Vickers hunts them down.

Psycho Cop was one of the many, low-budget slashers to come out in the 80s. It attempts to mix the wilderness mayhem of Friday the 13th with the quippy villainy of A Nightmare on Elm Street but the movie never comes anywhere close to being as memorable as either one of those films. The main problem is that Joe Vickers is not a very interesting killer. His one-liners are forgettable and, in this film at least, Robert R. Shafer is one of the least intimidating killers in the history of the genre. He has the right build to be menacing but, whenever he speaks, his weak voice ruins whatever element of danger may have been present. Even his attempt at an evil smile comes across as being more goofy than creepy. As opposed to the Maniac Cop films, Psycho Cop also doesn’t do much with the idea of Vickers being a cop. It’s just a uniform that he happens to be wearing, much like the masks worn by Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers. A film like this is only as strong as its villain and Vickers, to put it gently, is not Freddy Krueger.

Psycho Cop was followed by a sequel called Psycho Cop Returns, which not only made Vickers being a cop a key part of the film’s plot but which also featured Shafer returning in the lead role and giving a much stronger performance. (It helps that Vickers doesn’t speak much in Psycho Cop Returns.) Because the sequel had all of the nudity and the blood that was missing from the tame first film, it was frequently aired on Cinemax and Showtime in the 90s, developed a cult following, and was released on DVD and blu-ray by Vinegar Sydrome in 2017. The first film, on the other hand, has never been released on anything other than VHS and it’s so obscure that several reviewers assumed that the title of Psycho Cop Returns was meant as a joke, a play on how every slasher film released in the early 90s was a sequel.

No, it’s no joke. Psycho Cop does exist. It’s just not every good. If you’re dying to see a killer cop film, Maniac Cop is still the one to go with.

Of the many deliberately ludicrous and over-the-top nature-gone-made films to be released in the wake of Sharknado, Zombeavers is one of the most impressive. Certainly, it’s probably the best film that will ever made about zombie beavers.

The film takes place in one of those isolated areas of rural America where cell phones don’t work, everyone drives a pickup truck, and nobody would dare be seen without a shotgun in his hands. Of course, if you’ve ever seen a horror movie before than you know that any area this isolated is going to inevitably be ground zero in a mutant beaver attack.

Perhaps not surprisingly, it’s all John Mayer’s fault. Yes, that’s right, John “Your Body Is A Wonderland” Mayer. He makes his feature film acting debut here, playing a dumbass trucker who, after his truck collides with a deer, ends up losing a barrel of toxic waste. That barrel rolls into a nearby lake where it turns the local beaver population into zombeavers!

(Whenever I watch anything on Netflix, I always turn on the closed captioning. One of the joys of watching Zombeavers came from getting to read sentences like “Zombeavers growl,” at the bottom of the screen.)

Meanwhile, three sorority sisters are spending the weekend at a nearby cabin. Jenn (Lexi Atkins) is depressed because she caught her boyfriend cheating on her. Zoe (Cortney Palm) is sarcastic, uses “bitch” as a term of affection, and owns a puppy named Gosling. (I related to Zoe, despite being a cat person.) Mary (Rachel Melvin) owns the cabin and is determined to have the perfect girls weekend. Unfortunately, those plans are ruined by both the surprise arrival of their boyfriends and a sudden zombeaver attack…

Fortunately, there is a potentially crazy but helpful hunter wandering around the woods. His name is Smyth (“Smyth with a y,” he says upon introducing himself) and he’s played by veteran character actor Rex Linn. Linn doesn’t get much dialogue but he still manages to make every line memorable as he gives a performance that strikes a perfect balance between drama and parody. At one point, Linn delivers a monologue about how, in the 1970s, everyone in the county got “beaver fever.” It’s ludicrous and the joke is so obvious but Linn bring so much commitment to the monologue and to his performance that he sells it.

And really, the same can be said for Zombeavers as a movie. It’s ludicrous. It’s silly. There’s not a single beaver joke that doesn’t, at some point, get made. And yet, the film works. It’s a parody that somehow manages to remain credible. Yes, the zombeavers are intentionally designed to look fake but you still would not necessarily want to come across one at the foot of your bed in the middle of the night. Yes, the characters say a lot of silly things but the cast delivers those lines with both a straight face and a lot of conviction. (In fact, all three of the lead actresses are totally natural and convincing in their roles.) Everyone involved with the film — from the cast to crew — is so committed to the material that it works even when it shouldn’t.

Zombeavers is currently available on Netflix and should be watched by anyone who loves insane monster movies. It’s the best movie about zombie beavers ever made.